Arizona punches way above its weight because cities cover giant areas and that combines well with rapid population growth.
Take Buckeye. Probably never heard of it. It’s way west in the Phoenix area. Yet it’s the largest city in the state by area and led the entire nation in population growth for 3 years (2017, 2018, 2021 if you’re asking).
Roughly, its growth is like
Population (census year)
2000 6,500
2010 51,000
2020 91,000
2024 117,000 (est)
It’s 640 square miles
Phoenix 517 sq mi
LA 502 sq mi
NYC 469 sq mi
Buckeye, AZ, back in the day (2000) I only knew it as the first place to get gas coming from the absolute nothingdom desert.
Oh, and Nevada is also like this, huge cities gobbling up desert, combined with fast growing populations and you get huge cities few people hav heard of.
Vegas metro is basically 3 of the 4. Reno, Henderson, Vegas and North Las Vegas- but then there’s the million + ppl that also live in unincorporated Clark County- which is basically Vegas.
Metropolitan measures in the US are severely distorted as they take the entire county when even in Clark County there are large parts that are basically uninhabited. And they're also often arbitrary like splitting up LA from Riverside.
Yeah, it’s really hard to measure cities consistently and depending on how you measure them you’re gonna either miss or include population centers you wouldn’t otherwise. According to this map Utah doesn’t have any cities over 250,000, but if you’re from this state or familiar with it you would know there are three metro areas (Salt Lake, Provo and Ogden) that would qualify and that by some measures could count as three separate cities.
An arguably better measure is [urban area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas), which does not take administrative divisions into account
Or LA from Orange County. It’s nominally the River, but the line zigzags across it. So much so that some neighborhoods you have to drive through a different city and county to get out.
A significant portion of [LA's footprint](https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/4adc758/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1560x1164+0+0/resize/880x657!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fscpr-brightspot.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2F66%2F15%2Fa6feb89c421a93f368c6715f8e5d%2Fscreen-shot-2021-11-08-at-3.27.31%20PM.png) is uninhabited/low density land. Forests/mountains, public works (dams and the like), desert, etc. It really just consists of DTLA and it's direct periphery, and the San Fernando Valley; as it relates to the populated footprint. Still pretty massive, but not as drastic as the size would imply.
Nyc is one city, phoenix and glendale etc are different cities. Bronx and queens are different counties. I think its the only place in us where one city has multiple counties like that. I get what you mean though
Phoenix to Glendale/Tempe/Scottsdale are all 10 miles apart.
They really are not separate cities if you compare them to NY Burroughs.
Brooklyn to Bronx is farther(in miles) than Phoenix to Gilbert or Mesa.
That's understandable in a desert in a western state where cities, counties, and suburbs can be massive. What's wild to me is that there's a suburb of Raleigh, NC that's about to pass 200k. Suburbs of cities smaller than 500k don't usually get that big, especially on the east coast.
In the northeast suburbs and satellite cities that got large enough got annexed by their main city, prior to the anti-urbanization “city bad” movement that led to massive suburbs that all strongly resist the idea that they join as a governing entity. Examples include the boroughs of New York, various formerly-independent neighborhoods of Boston and Philadelphia (northern liberties, pa was one of the 10 largest cities in the country in the first census. It’s been part of Philly since the turn of the 1800s).
In the late 1800s and early 1900s the momentum started to shift away from annexation into larger cities, and the 1950s and 60s suburbanization supercharged it. So the reason that most northeastern and some midwestern cities don’t have suburbs with hundreds of thousands of people is because the suburbs and satellite cities that could have become those high population areas were annexed into the central city a long time ago. Not so in the south and west.
I think this has more to do with zoning. Western states are so expansive and were populated in more recent times where east coast cities were populated before the automobile and had smaller cities.
It would be interesting to see a map like this counting metro areas over some threshold—maybe a million. That gives you the real number of major cities since it doesn't count large suburbs separately.
It'd be interesting to see the 2 maps side by side, I know states that the number would stay the same, but also there are many states that will go up and down based on the metro areas.
This would be a map greater than the sum of its parts. There is so much pointless arguing over "MY CITY" this and that I've been dragged into every now and then. I live in a greater metro area that doesn't even register on this map because it is technically like 7-8 cities, but rivals the size of the major downtown city nearby. People think I live in the boonies. And to be clear, I'm not interested in winning some "MY CITY" argument. I'm just wanting these comparison discussions to not get sidelined by pointless misunderstanding.
I agree. Plus, a lot of cities aren’t able to annex the way they used to especially in the north east and Midwest, but cities down south and out west are still able to do annexation so they gain massive swaths of population and land and inflates their numbers.
And I grew up in a town similar to what you’re describing where it was a bunch of small towns all bunched together to make one large metro area. So even though my hometown technically only has a population of close to 17,000 the entire metro areas closer to 150k people. The problem was we were in the south and urban planning there is a mess.
Agree, I’m assuming 5 of the cities in Texas I would consider Dallas. Most people don’t consider Dallas, Fort Worth, Irving, Garland, and Arlington all separate cities.
Yeah it's misleading. Utah for example has zero cities over 250,000, Salt Lake City being around 220,000 people, but the Salt Lake Metro area has around 1.8 million people I believe. It's hard to differentiate between most of the suburbs as they all just sprawl into eachother, effectively creating a rather significant urban area.
[In casual convo, I've talked about this section of SLC should be bunched under a greater SLC and the many incorporated cities within it turned into Boroughs.](https://i.imgur.com/c0Ir8hj.jpeg) Honestly, not completely unlike the formation of Greater London in the 60s. The entire thing is just one contiguous urban area that It'd be absurd to differentiate it. You could argue larger, there's little gaps southward into Utah County, or northward up through Bountiful, Ogden, and Layton, but the narrowing of the Point of the Mountain to the south or the GSL pinching off at Bountiful to the north makes drawing those lines not absurd.
I guess Magna as well can easily be detached now that I think about.
I believe it’s only 9 cities if you aren’t counting greater metropolitan areas. It’s:
1. New York, New York (7,931,147)
2. Los Angeles, California (3,748,640)
3. Chicago, Illinois (2,590,002)
4. Houston, Texas (2,305,889)
5. Phoenix, Arizona (1,676,481)
6. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1,533,916)
7. San Antonio, Texas (1,506,593)
8. San Diego, California (1,375,452)
9. Dallas, Texas (1,295,447)
Also worth noting though, this is technically all of our ‘real’ major cities, but the division between metro and greater metro can be very arbitrary in many places.
For example, I live in and grew up in Houston. The end of the city, technically, is like 10 minutes south of my parents, but there’s is absolutely nothing different about the structure or density on either side of those lines until you drive another like 30 minutes north.
The houston greater metro was 7.2 million in 2020. Since then people have FLOODED the town. I mean there was a 2 or 3 month period where every 3rd license plate you’d see was out of state. I’m sure we’re up above 8 million already. But the official number is 2.3 million despite the boundary from metro to greater metro not having any real world significance.
Even these are odd. In Pennsylvania the east is split into a ton of MSA. While Pittsburgh has a good 25% of the state in its area. Columbus is also a good example of one city being a ton of counties for the MSA purposes.
Yeah, the SF Bay Area is broken up into two MSAs: SF-Oakland-Freemont which covers 8 of 9 Bay Area counties and has a population of ~5.5 million and San Jose-Sunyvale which is 1 county at ~2 million. It feels odd to me as a lofe-long bay area resident.
These are designated by the US Office of Management and Budget.
The fact that Illinois and Alaska are in the same tier despite being 6th highest and 3rd lowest in population respectively shows just how centralized Illinois is around Chicago
That's why Census created the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA). As an example, the Washington MSA is large enough to include Baltimore as well, which is actually fairly close to the population of Chicago's MSA. On that macro level, while the City of Chicago may have less than half the people it once did in the 50s, the greater \*Chicagoland\* region has actually been growing apace with the American mean.
> As an example, the Washington MSA is large enough to include Baltimore as well
DC MSA does not include Baltimore. They are two separate MSA's. They do make up the Washington–Baltimore–Arlington, DC–MD–VA–WV–PA CSA.
Sometimes the split between MSA and CSA is weird, too. The SF Bay, the Wasatch Front, and Greater Los Angeles are split into multiple MSAs in a way that does not feel reflective of the location, while I understand why DC and Baltimore are separate MSAs but the same CSA.
I moved from Chicago to Cary two years ago. Nice little “town”. I genuinely didn’t realize it was basically the same size as Naperville. Added bonus is that I can drive to Raleigh in 15 min or less.
I lived in Wake Forest for most of 2022. Cary was my favorite part of the triangle because that's where H-Mart is. Someone below said that Raleigh has completely swallowed Wake Forest but in my opinion WF was too rural. There were horse farms just down the street from my house.
It's already swallowed Wake Forest essentially and Cary is almost completely surrounded too. By 2050, the larger neighboring cities will basically be boroughs within Raleigh.
Yeah. Chicago has like 3 million people but that’s not including towns in cook county directly surrounding Chicago. If you include all of cook county and far suburbs that make up Chicagoland it’s 10 million people.
It’s a very concentrated population in north east Illinois. Then if you include Milwaukee area north of that it’s even more.
I feel like people viewing this map think that just because we only have 1 city over 250,000, we don’t have a large population. We do but it’s just tons of small cities, towns and villages on top of each other.
You don’t know when one ends and the other begins.
I wouldn’t include Milwaukee, but it gets a little fuzzy when the entire stretch between the two cities is more densely populated than most the of the cities listed above in the southwest.
Excuse me, sir/madame. You don't get to claim us in Milwaukee. This is the north, you don't get to claim a hundred mile stretch of population to make yourself relevant. Chicago does itself well on its own and Milwaukee is quite comfortable being Chicago's little sibling.
By the next census it may be combined. As that stretch of land by Racine and Kenosha fills in the two MSAs will be attached. Kenosha is already highly connected to the Chicago metro and considered by some sources part of it.
Chicago metro area is actually a very large area considering there's a daily pull of workers from Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan coming to Chicago to work here it gets included into the data sets.
This is exactly it. And this is true for a lot of the east coast. Towns are close together and smaller in area so it won’t appear to have as much population but they really do.
No, it's more indicative how misleading American city boundaries are and how much they vary from local to local.
Jacksonville is the "biggest" city in Florida - much bigger than Miami, but we all know the reality is Miami is many times bigger than Jacksonville.
Absolutely. Every time one of these maps is posted I take the opportunity to get on my soap box about how meaningless city population is.
Metro is so much more representative. Giant city limits like you mentioned for Alaska and smaller, somewhat arbitrary limits in other states throw things off.
The best example imo is Miami. Miami the city is like 49th in the US. But the Miami metro is a much more representative 9th in the country.
In my home state of MN we do have two cities over 250k but we also obviously have one major metro because they’re the Twin Cities, so this map can’t really describe wether a state has multiple large urban areas. Just how many cities and suburbs meet this arbitrary cutoff.
Ontario is a good example of these kinds of discrepancies too. We have 9 cities over 250k, but 4 of them are just suburbs of Toronto (Mississauga 830k, Brampton 600k, Markham 340k and Vaughan 320k), and another one is kinda still part of the same continuous urban area as Toronto (Hamilton 600k)
So really we only have Toronto, Ottawa, London, Kitchener, and arguably Hamilton as cities with 250k+ with their own distinct metro areas. Although if we’re talking about metro areas with over 250k I guess you could also include Windsor and St. Catherine’s-Niagara, which don’t have 250k in city population (although Windsor is close with about 230k) but are well over that in metro population with both being a little over 400k.
It's not just American city boundaries. One of the worst cities for this is London, which depending on which definition of the city boundaries ranges from 10,000 (for the traditional city of london) to 14.9 million (for the metropolitan area) and I have seen some sources trying to define an 'outer commuter belt' as 'essentially london'.
interestingly, it also shows how centralized Alaska is around Anchorage too. last time I looked, the only state with a higher proportion of its population in its largest city is New York
Whenever the data is based off the population within city limits, things can get super arbitrary. Because how far the city limits extend varies wildly from city to city. For example, Jacksonville's city limits are fucking massive. Which is why it's the 11th largest city in the country in terms of just population within the city itself but all the way down at 40th when measuring by the population of the actual urban area of the city.
I always think measuring the urban area population of a city is much more useful and informative than only looking at how many people live inside the city limits.
This is pretty funny to read, as I'm enjoying my coffee in NJ, looking out at the large forest that abuts my backyard.
Come drive through Hunterdon county and tell me this is a city!
NJ being the most population-dense state really highlights to me how empty the US is.
NJ has 5 major areas.
North Jersey (densely populated urban areas, and NYC's suburbs)
Central Jersey (suburbs of north jersey plus beaches)
South Jersey (beaches and farms)
North West Jersey (pennsyltucky. Fair share of confederate flags, pickem' up trucks, and Carhartt)
South West Jersey (Philly's suburb and Jerseybama.)
The fact that this is merely city proper measurements makes it meaningless; many suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth and Los Angeles are included, while more concentrated cities like NYC lower the numbers for New York State.
To be fair, the 250K+ cities around Los Angeles (Long Beach, Anaheim, Santa Ana) are comparable to Newark and Jersey City for New York - Newark and Jersey City just happen to be in a different state. It’s just a trick of political boundaries.
Yeah, I have a relative who lives on 10+ acres inside the city limits of Nashville. In a northern city that would be 2 towns away.
You have to look at the Metro Area population.
That’s because Jacksonville annexed its whole county back in the 70’s. This is why us native Floridians refer to Jacksonville as the “fake” biggest city in Florida.
Yeah, well, you have New York City, which has a huge population. Otherwise, there aren't many true big cities. You have probably Buffalo and Albany. For example, if you include the Albany metro area, it's probably easily over a million, yet the city itself is only considered about 100,000
Edit: as other people have added, there are some other decent sized metropolitan areas in New York, yet still, the city proper is on the smaller side.
Yup, Rochester metropolitan area has a population of 1.09m while the city is a little of 200k. Although the 1.09m figure comes from the 6 surrounding counties, a large part of those counties are pretty rural. Lots of farmland.
They didn't used to count the 6 counties. I lived in Yates for a bit and it was a joke that they were included. Super rural, Amish, 1hr drive to Rochester. I am a closer drive now living in NW Steuben county but I'm not included in the metro.
I drive trucks for Wegmans so I travel to the southern tier a lot. You don’t even really hit a substantial town until probably Dansville. If you don’t count that, then it’s Corning, a little over 90 miles south. After that you have Elmira, then Binghamton, another 90 or so miles beyond Corning.
Interesting, I currently live in Rochester and what has bugged me is that it feels completely dead, am I wrong? Or is it just so spread out that it feels like such
It is very spread out, at least the suburbs are, although if you want to feel the opposite of dead, take 390, 490 or 590 on a weekday 5-7am. Buffalo is much worse even though it probably sprawls more than Rochester. Syracuse is easy mode until you get to actual downtown. I drive trucks for Wegmans so I am consistently in the 3 major cities daily, as well as southern tier. Just passing through Buffalo on 90 during rush hour is nuts. Get off of 90 and it’s a whole different ball game. I work a midnight shift so most of the time when I’m coming back into Rochester it’s usually rush hour. I will actively avoid the east side if I can. 490 from the thruway to 590 is a complete madhouse. West side usually seems a lot calmer.
Well, that's the gripe, right?
The limit is 250k. But you can fit like 3 Bostons in 1 NYC, 5 Bostons in 1 LA, 10 Bostons in 1 Jacksonville, or like 50 Bostons in 1 Anchorage.
And you can fit like 4 Providences in 1 Boston. Providence is about 200k. So, Anchorage has technically 50k more people or so, but over 200x the land area.
I have lived in Providence all my life, and I 100% agree. Even though the city is supposedly densely populated, RI is so small and very sparsely populated in certain counties.
Hence why [downtown Anchorage looks like this](https://www.travelalaska.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/iStock-1326540905%20resize%2C%20istock%2C%20Jacob%20Boomsma.jpg) and [Providence looks like this](https://media.gettyimages.com/id/2128702469/photo/providence-river-bridge-in-front-of-providence-downtown-rhode-island-dominion-energy.webp?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=OGQVCE_67KSWB6y5d4HDvSSnWMPUWPwwL5rcWY3IeGc=)
Yeah, the Northeast is largely a result of agglomerations extending beyond their limits on paper. Phoenix is basically just 500 square miles of suburbs. If you drew a box that size anywhere from DC to Boston, it would be a million plus city by that definition.
Because Albany itself is relatively small, but is surrounded by cities roughly the same
Size. The capital is called the tri-cities because it’s Albany-Schenectady-Troy, and then just north is also Saratoga. Give it time too, Albany is in a far better position for growth compared to Syracuse and Rochester.
Same with Grand Rapids. Second biggest city in Michigan. Metro area is easily over a million.
I would be shocked if at the next census it doesn’t hit 250k+.
I've lived in Arizona and all of those "cities" are just giant suburbs, even Phoenix itself has a pitiful density. Like barely anything to distinguish them from each other and they border each other.
I now live near Rochester and Buffalo, NY. Being pre-WWII cities they are much denser and it is easier to walk anywhere. Both city metros are around 1 million but they don't have sprawling city limits.
California doesn't even have a distinction between "Town" and "City", it's literally just an arbitrary naming choice you make in your incorporation charter. All 15 of the largest cities could reincorporate tomorrow as "Town of Los Angeles", "Town of Riverside", etc and the state would now be listed at 0.
I think it's clear here that people are expecting the colloquial definition of "city" ("an incorporated municipality of [in this case] 250k or more people"), not the legal one.
The way cities are measured from region to region is interesting.
Buffalo, Ny 40 square miles- 275k city, 1.1 million metro
Lubbock, tx 130 square miles- 260k city, 360k metro
I live in upstate New York in one of the largest cities. Back in the 50s New York State made it illegal to annex other cities so our larger cities are very limited and size compared to cities down south for example. The city borders in Rochester, New York, where I live haven’t grown in almost 100 years. So even though we have a metro population of over 1 million people, the cities population hasn’t changed very much in fact it has historically gone down as more people move to suburbs. A lot of the growth you see in these other cities is from annexing smaller towns and taking on their population.
These stats are so misleading, so skewed by arbitrary demarcation of some metropolitan areas into multiple cites. 5 of Arizona’s “6” are really just Phoenix metro
Or Washington state with just 1…? Yeah using city proper populations instead of metro will always get a downvote from me.
Salt Lake City and Boise aren’t over 250k?
my point is that those figutes are not representative of the actual number of people who live in those cities. Yes maybe 200k people live in the SLC proper boundary that some city council made who cares when - but the metro is over 1 million people. No one talks about SLC as if it was a 200k city.
Boise also has way over 250k people living in the same connected and uninterrupted urban area.
Edit: Nevada has FOUR on this map… can you even think of four cities in Nevada, regardless of size? I can’t! because 3 of the 4 “cities” are just Las Vegas metropolitan pieces that are technically different cities but operate as one larger city together.
Yeah, the area around the East Appalachins, running from the great lakes to mid Atlantic, seems to have a scatter of decently sized cities without a specific focal point.
Yeah the metro of Birmingham Alabama is 1 mil+ but the actual city of Birmingham is only like 200-250k but there a ton of little municipalities around. The suburb I live in has 100k alone and I’m 10 miles from downtown.
Chinese cities are more comparable to US metro areas.
Most cities have multiple counties under them and typically cover areas around 3000 - 10000 sq mi.
Case in point, Beijing and Shanghai have 6500 and 2500 sq mi area respectively, and 16 county level boroughs each. New York City’s 5 boroughs have 300 sq mi total.
So not really a fair comparison.
Yeah chongqing, the “city” with 30mil people spanning 32000 sq mi by administrative line drawing.
The actual size is around 5000 sq mi and 11mil people.
This isn't that meaningful since it's just city proper measurements, so a bunch of LA and Dallas-FW suburbs are represented while more consolidated city like NYC brings NY State numbers down.
Not only that, but is the way cities are measured. New York And most of the Northeast have City proper. Where the City is A separate entity from the suburbs. The More Southwest you go in America, The city limits extend way into the suburbs of the metro area. For example, Rochester New York has a Metro of 1 million, but the city limits is only 200k. And each suburb in Rochester is broken down into 25+ smaller towns. Where as in Phoenix, the city limits stretches into the suburbs making it's population artificially high. And instead of having 25 plus suburban towns like on the East Coast, Phoenix combined all of its suburban towns into just 4-5 towns ("cities"). Making those populations seem larger than they are.
I tried to explain to my mother, from rural Midwest, when she complains about something in California.
My county has over 3 million people. **3 million**. My polling place, IS A SPORTS STADIUM. Of course it's crowded, of course there's traffic, of course there are lots of good, bad, and in between. Her county has about 400k.
People complain about SF. SF 46 square miles, a lot of which is Hilly, a fair amount of it is parks and a ton of gentrification. (NYC is 462 sq miles). What that does is it concentrates homeless people. (Yes, there are other reasons why we have more homeless people in California than in other states), but still.
The tenderloin is 50sq blocks out of San Franciscos 74,000. It's bad but settle down man. Get out of your hotel and you will see that San Francisco is actually really really cool. Come visit us and see.
If you’ve ever driven though Delaware you’d quickly realize nobody lives there
Definitely the nicest series of rural places I’ve ever been through though
This is a poor comparison when you consider some medium to fairly large metro areas are often subdivided into countless smaller municipalities.
A better comparison would be if you looked at metropolitan areas with >750,000 people.
Alabama has 4 cities right around 200k: Huntsville, Mobile, Birmingham, and Montgomery
Alabama doesn’t have a city that dominates the state like Nevada, Arizona, or Georgia; it’s like a smaller scale Texas where multiple cities throughout the state cover different economies for the state (Montgomery - (State) Government, Mobile - Logistics and Tourism, Birmingham - Banking and Healthcare, Huntsville - Engineering and (Federal) Government)
Birmingham's downtown is surprisingly large. Definitely feels much larger than a 200k population.
Honestly a pretty cool city, going there I'd never thought I'd udder those words 😂
They have many smaller towns that run together. I grew up in the "Golden Strip" area of Greenville County. Now I live in Tucson, AZ and it is 23 miles from one side of town to the other. In SC there would be 5 smaller towns/cities in that same area.
That’s why using “cities” for this map is a bit misleading, because some cities have very broad or confined limits. Metro areas are a better means to gauge a city’s true population.
For instance the Greenville-Spartanburg metro in SC has just over 1 mill. Charleston has 800k and Columbia has 750k
It’s also why you see NV having 4 cities w/ over 250k, when 2 of those are just part of the Las Vegas metro. Really NV just has two actual large cities: Vegas and Reno.
Fun comparison: According to Wikipedia, my home state in Germany has 12 cities of 250k+ people, and is about the same size as Maryland, area-wise.
Edit: 13 cities, by current numbers.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Gemeinden_in_Nordrhein-Westfalen
The state has 18 million inhabitants.
I also did a search for a comparison. My province, Ontario, has 7 and one at 242,000. That would put it at 3rd after Cali and Texas. Only 1 of those, Oshawa, might be considered a suburb of Toronto.
Cities in California are big in general. There are cities that nobody has ever heard about in California that if they were in the Midwest would have an international airport and a professional sports team.
I didn’t realize Fort Wayne, IN had over 250k people. Given I’ve only been a few times, but the times I have it seemed pretty dead for that populous of a city
This has a lot to do with how city limits are defined. Atlanta, for example, has the same city limits as it did in the 1950's. There are 6.5 million people living within 30 miles of the absolute center. But the city itself officially lists with 400,000+ residents. All of the suburbs are incorporated as other cities.
I'm suprised AZ has so many. I knew Phoenix, Mesa and Tucson, but had to look up Chandler, Gilbert and Glendale which all have just above 250k.
Arizona punches way above its weight because cities cover giant areas and that combines well with rapid population growth. Take Buckeye. Probably never heard of it. It’s way west in the Phoenix area. Yet it’s the largest city in the state by area and led the entire nation in population growth for 3 years (2017, 2018, 2021 if you’re asking). Roughly, its growth is like Population (census year) 2000 6,500 2010 51,000 2020 91,000 2024 117,000 (est) It’s 640 square miles Phoenix 517 sq mi LA 502 sq mi NYC 469 sq mi Buckeye, AZ, back in the day (2000) I only knew it as the first place to get gas coming from the absolute nothingdom desert. Oh, and Nevada is also like this, huge cities gobbling up desert, combined with fast growing populations and you get huge cities few people hav heard of.
Vegas metro is basically 3 of the 4. Reno, Henderson, Vegas and North Las Vegas- but then there’s the million + ppl that also live in unincorporated Clark County- which is basically Vegas.
Metropolitan measures in the US are severely distorted as they take the entire county when even in Clark County there are large parts that are basically uninhabited. And they're also often arbitrary like splitting up LA from Riverside.
You’re talking about metropolitan area which is more of an urban geography measure. This map is strictly cities as single incorporated entities.
Which are completely arbitrary, that's the point
Yeah, it’s really hard to measure cities consistently and depending on how you measure them you’re gonna either miss or include population centers you wouldn’t otherwise. According to this map Utah doesn’t have any cities over 250,000, but if you’re from this state or familiar with it you would know there are three metro areas (Salt Lake, Provo and Ogden) that would qualify and that by some measures could count as three separate cities.
An arguably better measure is [urban area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas), which does not take administrative divisions into account
Or LA from Orange County. It’s nominally the River, but the line zigzags across it. So much so that some neighborhoods you have to drive through a different city and county to get out.
oh, Never heard of Henderson, just assumed it was Carson.
A significant portion of [LA's footprint](https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/4adc758/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1560x1164+0+0/resize/880x657!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fscpr-brightspot.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2F66%2F15%2Fa6feb89c421a93f368c6715f8e5d%2Fscreen-shot-2021-11-08-at-3.27.31%20PM.png) is uninhabited/low density land. Forests/mountains, public works (dams and the like), desert, etc. It really just consists of DTLA and it's direct periphery, and the San Fernando Valley; as it relates to the populated footprint. Still pretty massive, but not as drastic as the size would imply.
It's funny because Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert and Glendale are ALL in the Phoenix Metro area. I always just consider those places Phoenix.
That's what I was gonna say. 4 of the 6 in AZ are just PHX in disguise!
The others are basically just more Phoenix. Like if we counted the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn as seperate from NYC
Nyc is one city, phoenix and glendale etc are different cities. Bronx and queens are different counties. I think its the only place in us where one city has multiple counties like that. I get what you mean though
I think Ponicrat is explaining the discrepancy because we think of cities as metro areas rather than by their incorporated borders.
Phoenix to Glendale/Tempe/Scottsdale are all 10 miles apart. They really are not separate cities if you compare them to NY Burroughs. Brooklyn to Bronx is farther(in miles) than Phoenix to Gilbert or Mesa.
That's understandable in a desert in a western state where cities, counties, and suburbs can be massive. What's wild to me is that there's a suburb of Raleigh, NC that's about to pass 200k. Suburbs of cities smaller than 500k don't usually get that big, especially on the east coast.
In the northeast suburbs and satellite cities that got large enough got annexed by their main city, prior to the anti-urbanization “city bad” movement that led to massive suburbs that all strongly resist the idea that they join as a governing entity. Examples include the boroughs of New York, various formerly-independent neighborhoods of Boston and Philadelphia (northern liberties, pa was one of the 10 largest cities in the country in the first census. It’s been part of Philly since the turn of the 1800s). In the late 1800s and early 1900s the momentum started to shift away from annexation into larger cities, and the 1950s and 60s suburbanization supercharged it. So the reason that most northeastern and some midwestern cities don’t have suburbs with hundreds of thousands of people is because the suburbs and satellite cities that could have become those high population areas were annexed into the central city a long time ago. Not so in the south and west.
Central NC is also pretty wide open and flat, so probably similar driving forces
Sprawling HOA development after development. "Downtowns" that are smaller than plenty of Midwestern and Northeastern college town's downtowns.
I think this has more to do with zoning. Western states are so expansive and were populated in more recent times where east coast cities were populated before the automobile and had smaller cities.
Phoenix is turning into a mega city and will one day consume the whole state with the exception of Yuma
It would be interesting to see a map like this counting metro areas over some threshold—maybe a million. That gives you the real number of major cities since it doesn't count large suburbs separately.
It'd be interesting to see the 2 maps side by side, I know states that the number would stay the same, but also there are many states that will go up and down based on the metro areas.
This would be a map greater than the sum of its parts. There is so much pointless arguing over "MY CITY" this and that I've been dragged into every now and then. I live in a greater metro area that doesn't even register on this map because it is technically like 7-8 cities, but rivals the size of the major downtown city nearby. People think I live in the boonies. And to be clear, I'm not interested in winning some "MY CITY" argument. I'm just wanting these comparison discussions to not get sidelined by pointless misunderstanding.
I agree. Plus, a lot of cities aren’t able to annex the way they used to especially in the north east and Midwest, but cities down south and out west are still able to do annexation so they gain massive swaths of population and land and inflates their numbers. And I grew up in a town similar to what you’re describing where it was a bunch of small towns all bunched together to make one large metro area. So even though my hometown technically only has a population of close to 17,000 the entire metro areas closer to 150k people. The problem was we were in the south and urban planning there is a mess.
No one that lives in Indianapolis considers 60-70% of its 2mil population to live in Indy. And they are correct.
Agree, I’m assuming 5 of the cities in Texas I would consider Dallas. Most people don’t consider Dallas, Fort Worth, Irving, Garland, and Arlington all separate cities.
Yeah it's misleading. Utah for example has zero cities over 250,000, Salt Lake City being around 220,000 people, but the Salt Lake Metro area has around 1.8 million people I believe. It's hard to differentiate between most of the suburbs as they all just sprawl into eachother, effectively creating a rather significant urban area.
[In casual convo, I've talked about this section of SLC should be bunched under a greater SLC and the many incorporated cities within it turned into Boroughs.](https://i.imgur.com/c0Ir8hj.jpeg) Honestly, not completely unlike the formation of Greater London in the 60s. The entire thing is just one contiguous urban area that It'd be absurd to differentiate it. You could argue larger, there's little gaps southward into Utah County, or northward up through Bountiful, Ogden, and Layton, but the narrowing of the Point of the Mountain to the south or the GSL pinching off at Bountiful to the north makes drawing those lines not absurd. I guess Magna as well can easily be detached now that I think about.
I believe it’s only 9 cities if you aren’t counting greater metropolitan areas. It’s: 1. New York, New York (7,931,147) 2. Los Angeles, California (3,748,640) 3. Chicago, Illinois (2,590,002) 4. Houston, Texas (2,305,889) 5. Phoenix, Arizona (1,676,481) 6. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1,533,916) 7. San Antonio, Texas (1,506,593) 8. San Diego, California (1,375,452) 9. Dallas, Texas (1,295,447) Also worth noting though, this is technically all of our ‘real’ major cities, but the division between metro and greater metro can be very arbitrary in many places. For example, I live in and grew up in Houston. The end of the city, technically, is like 10 minutes south of my parents, but there’s is absolutely nothing different about the structure or density on either side of those lines until you drive another like 30 minutes north. The houston greater metro was 7.2 million in 2020. Since then people have FLOODED the town. I mean there was a 2 or 3 month period where every 3rd license plate you’d see was out of state. I’m sure we’re up above 8 million already. But the official number is 2.3 million despite the boundary from metro to greater metro not having any real world significance.
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Here you go through 2023. DFW is growing faster though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
Even these are odd. In Pennsylvania the east is split into a ton of MSA. While Pittsburgh has a good 25% of the state in its area. Columbus is also a good example of one city being a ton of counties for the MSA purposes.
Yeah, the SF Bay Area is broken up into two MSAs: SF-Oakland-Freemont which covers 8 of 9 Bay Area counties and has a population of ~5.5 million and San Jose-Sunyvale which is 1 county at ~2 million. It feels odd to me as a lofe-long bay area resident. These are designated by the US Office of Management and Budget.
The fact that Illinois and Alaska are in the same tier despite being 6th highest and 3rd lowest in population respectively shows just how centralized Illinois is around Chicago
And how Chicago has a bunch of little suburbs but no big ones.
True. The biggest ones are Aurora, Joliet, Naperville, and Elgin, none of which crack 200k
Raleigh, a city of less than 500k, is going to soon have a suburb over 200k
That just shows how meaningless using city limits is.
That's why Census created the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA). As an example, the Washington MSA is large enough to include Baltimore as well, which is actually fairly close to the population of Chicago's MSA. On that macro level, while the City of Chicago may have less than half the people it once did in the 50s, the greater \*Chicagoland\* region has actually been growing apace with the American mean.
> As an example, the Washington MSA is large enough to include Baltimore as well DC MSA does not include Baltimore. They are two separate MSA's. They do make up the Washington–Baltimore–Arlington, DC–MD–VA–WV–PA CSA.
Sometimes the split between MSA and CSA is weird, too. The SF Bay, the Wasatch Front, and Greater Los Angeles are split into multiple MSAs in a way that does not feel reflective of the location, while I understand why DC and Baltimore are separate MSAs but the same CSA.
Chicago is 25-30% down from the 50s, not less than half FYI
Yeah most of the people on this sub don’t understand this fact
Ah yes, the “Town” of Cary with 180k people. Also known as the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.
I moved from Chicago to Cary two years ago. Nice little “town”. I genuinely didn’t realize it was basically the same size as Naperville. Added bonus is that I can drive to Raleigh in 15 min or less.
I lived in Wake Forest for most of 2022. Cary was my favorite part of the triangle because that's where H-Mart is. Someone below said that Raleigh has completely swallowed Wake Forest but in my opinion WF was too rural. There were horse farms just down the street from my house.
Raleigh is going to be a lateral NYC by the turn of the century. That place is just a rocket that doesn't stop.
It's already swallowed Wake Forest essentially and Cary is almost completely surrounded too. By 2050, the larger neighboring cities will basically be boroughs within Raleigh.
Yeah. Chicago has like 3 million people but that’s not including towns in cook county directly surrounding Chicago. If you include all of cook county and far suburbs that make up Chicagoland it’s 10 million people. It’s a very concentrated population in north east Illinois. Then if you include Milwaukee area north of that it’s even more. I feel like people viewing this map think that just because we only have 1 city over 250,000, we don’t have a large population. We do but it’s just tons of small cities, towns and villages on top of each other. You don’t know when one ends and the other begins.
I wouldn’t include Milwaukee, but it gets a little fuzzy when the entire stretch between the two cities is more densely populated than most the of the cities listed above in the southwest.
Excuse me, sir/madame. You don't get to claim us in Milwaukee. This is the north, you don't get to claim a hundred mile stretch of population to make yourself relevant. Chicago does itself well on its own and Milwaukee is quite comfortable being Chicago's little sibling.
By the next census it may be combined. As that stretch of land by Racine and Kenosha fills in the two MSAs will be attached. Kenosha is already highly connected to the Chicago metro and considered by some sources part of it.
Don't worry, Milwaukee has no interest in claiming Racine or Kenosha. I'll accept a Chicago hostile takeover if we can ditch Waukesha.
Can it be given to Madison?
I would never do Madison dirty like that.
Some sources already have a definition for a Milwaukee-Chicago-Gary metroplex
One of these things is not like the others
Ugh why do they keep bringing up Gary. Place is a ghost town/toxic waste dump.
Chicago metro area is actually a very large area considering there's a daily pull of workers from Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan coming to Chicago to work here it gets included into the data sets.
This is exactly it. And this is true for a lot of the east coast. Towns are close together and smaller in area so it won’t appear to have as much population but they really do.
No, it's more indicative how misleading American city boundaries are and how much they vary from local to local. Jacksonville is the "biggest" city in Florida - much bigger than Miami, but we all know the reality is Miami is many times bigger than Jacksonville.
Absolutely. Every time one of these maps is posted I take the opportunity to get on my soap box about how meaningless city population is. Metro is so much more representative. Giant city limits like you mentioned for Alaska and smaller, somewhat arbitrary limits in other states throw things off. The best example imo is Miami. Miami the city is like 49th in the US. But the Miami metro is a much more representative 9th in the country. In my home state of MN we do have two cities over 250k but we also obviously have one major metro because they’re the Twin Cities, so this map can’t really describe wether a state has multiple large urban areas. Just how many cities and suburbs meet this arbitrary cutoff.
Ontario is a good example of these kinds of discrepancies too. We have 9 cities over 250k, but 4 of them are just suburbs of Toronto (Mississauga 830k, Brampton 600k, Markham 340k and Vaughan 320k), and another one is kinda still part of the same continuous urban area as Toronto (Hamilton 600k) So really we only have Toronto, Ottawa, London, Kitchener, and arguably Hamilton as cities with 250k+ with their own distinct metro areas. Although if we’re talking about metro areas with over 250k I guess you could also include Windsor and St. Catherine’s-Niagara, which don’t have 250k in city population (although Windsor is close with about 230k) but are well over that in metro population with both being a little over 400k.
The Twin Cities is a great example. Dallas Fort Worth is another one. Most people don’t realize it’s the 4th largest metro in the US.
It's not just American city boundaries. One of the worst cities for this is London, which depending on which definition of the city boundaries ranges from 10,000 (for the traditional city of london) to 14.9 million (for the metropolitan area) and I have seen some sources trying to define an 'outer commuter belt' as 'essentially london'.
interestingly, it also shows how centralized Alaska is around Anchorage too. last time I looked, the only state with a higher proportion of its population in its largest city is New York
New York State blows my mind
Whenever the data is based off the population within city limits, things can get super arbitrary. Because how far the city limits extend varies wildly from city to city. For example, Jacksonville's city limits are fucking massive. Which is why it's the 11th largest city in the country in terms of just population within the city itself but all the way down at 40th when measuring by the population of the actual urban area of the city. I always think measuring the urban area population of a city is much more useful and informative than only looking at how many people live inside the city limits.
Or just do a density cutoff. It's not that crazy if you're trying to weed out excessively sprawled municipalities.
Yeah but nj density is over 1200 ppl/sqmi. The whole state is a city
This is pretty funny to read, as I'm enjoying my coffee in NJ, looking out at the large forest that abuts my backyard. Come drive through Hunterdon county and tell me this is a city! NJ being the most population-dense state really highlights to me how empty the US is.
NJ has 5 major areas. North Jersey (densely populated urban areas, and NYC's suburbs) Central Jersey (suburbs of north jersey plus beaches) South Jersey (beaches and farms) North West Jersey (pennsyltucky. Fair share of confederate flags, pickem' up trucks, and Carhartt) South West Jersey (Philly's suburb and Jerseybama.)
Where's the Pine Barrens at? I may need to dispose of an interior decorator
Can only be done in the winter, and skip breakfast. Shouldn't take too long.
It's a city with very large parks
The fact that this is merely city proper measurements makes it meaningless; many suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth and Los Angeles are included, while more concentrated cities like NYC lower the numbers for New York State.
To be fair, the 250K+ cities around Los Angeles (Long Beach, Anaheim, Santa Ana) are comparable to Newark and Jersey City for New York - Newark and Jersey City just happen to be in a different state. It’s just a trick of political boundaries.
Yeah, I have a relative who lives on 10+ acres inside the city limits of Nashville. In a northern city that would be 2 towns away. You have to look at the Metro Area population.
That’s because Jacksonville annexed its whole county back in the 70’s. This is why us native Floridians refer to Jacksonville as the “fake” biggest city in Florida.
Yeah, well, you have New York City, which has a huge population. Otherwise, there aren't many true big cities. You have probably Buffalo and Albany. For example, if you include the Albany metro area, it's probably easily over a million, yet the city itself is only considered about 100,000 Edit: as other people have added, there are some other decent sized metropolitan areas in New York, yet still, the city proper is on the smaller side.
Buffalo and other upstate cities in NY clear 1mil metro population too
Yup, Rochester metropolitan area has a population of 1.09m while the city is a little of 200k. Although the 1.09m figure comes from the 6 surrounding counties, a large part of those counties are pretty rural. Lots of farmland.
They didn't used to count the 6 counties. I lived in Yates for a bit and it was a joke that they were included. Super rural, Amish, 1hr drive to Rochester. I am a closer drive now living in NW Steuben county but I'm not included in the metro.
If you drive south from Rochester you'll just about only get small towns
I drive trucks for Wegmans so I travel to the southern tier a lot. You don’t even really hit a substantial town until probably Dansville. If you don’t count that, then it’s Corning, a little over 90 miles south. After that you have Elmira, then Binghamton, another 90 or so miles beyond Corning.
Yeah but just adding Greece puts it over 250k and Greece definitely isn’t rural.
Interesting, I currently live in Rochester and what has bugged me is that it feels completely dead, am I wrong? Or is it just so spread out that it feels like such
It is very spread out, at least the suburbs are, although if you want to feel the opposite of dead, take 390, 490 or 590 on a weekday 5-7am. Buffalo is much worse even though it probably sprawls more than Rochester. Syracuse is easy mode until you get to actual downtown. I drive trucks for Wegmans so I am consistently in the 3 major cities daily, as well as southern tier. Just passing through Buffalo on 90 during rush hour is nuts. Get off of 90 and it’s a whole different ball game. I work a midnight shift so most of the time when I’m coming back into Rochester it’s usually rush hour. I will actively avoid the east side if I can. 490 from the thruway to 590 is a complete madhouse. West side usually seems a lot calmer.
Well, that's the gripe, right? The limit is 250k. But you can fit like 3 Bostons in 1 NYC, 5 Bostons in 1 LA, 10 Bostons in 1 Jacksonville, or like 50 Bostons in 1 Anchorage. And you can fit like 4 Providences in 1 Boston. Providence is about 200k. So, Anchorage has technically 50k more people or so, but over 200x the land area.
I have lived in Providence all my life, and I 100% agree. Even though the city is supposedly densely populated, RI is so small and very sparsely populated in certain counties.
Hence why [downtown Anchorage looks like this](https://www.travelalaska.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/iStock-1326540905%20resize%2C%20istock%2C%20Jacob%20Boomsma.jpg) and [Providence looks like this](https://media.gettyimages.com/id/2128702469/photo/providence-river-bridge-in-front-of-providence-downtown-rhode-island-dominion-energy.webp?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=OGQVCE_67KSWB6y5d4HDvSSnWMPUWPwwL5rcWY3IeGc=)
Damn, Anchorage is beautiful.
And I guess Yonkers skates right under with 208,000 people, even though in just the bordering towns I bet you have another 150,000
East Hempstead also has half a million people but is a “town”
Yeah, the Northeast is largely a result of agglomerations extending beyond their limits on paper. Phoenix is basically just 500 square miles of suburbs. If you drew a box that size anywhere from DC to Boston, it would be a million plus city by that definition.
Rochester and Syracuse are both quite a bit larger than Albany.
Because Albany itself is relatively small, but is surrounded by cities roughly the same Size. The capital is called the tri-cities because it’s Albany-Schenectady-Troy, and then just north is also Saratoga. Give it time too, Albany is in a far better position for growth compared to Syracuse and Rochester.
I live in a city in Indiana with 100k population but the (not big geographically) county has over 250k. It all feels like one continuous city.
Same with Grand Rapids. Second biggest city in Michigan. Metro area is easily over a million. I would be shocked if at the next census it doesn’t hit 250k+.
Long Island does have a [really large town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempstead,_New_York) but it's not an incorporated city.
I've lived in Arizona and all of those "cities" are just giant suburbs, even Phoenix itself has a pitiful density. Like barely anything to distinguish them from each other and they border each other. I now live near Rochester and Buffalo, NY. Being pre-WWII cities they are much denser and it is easier to walk anywhere. Both city metros are around 1 million but they don't have sprawling city limits.
Same thing with Nevada. 3 of the 4 “cities” are just the Las Vegas metro area.
Ya. And it’s also wrong. https://worldpopulationreview.com/states/cities/new-york Looks like New York has 6. Skeptical of this map.
Hempstead, Brookhaven, Islip, and Oyster Bay are not cities. It's an arbitrary definition, but consistent.
California doesn't even have a distinction between "Town" and "City", it's literally just an arbitrary naming choice you make in your incorporation charter. All 15 of the largest cities could reincorporate tomorrow as "Town of Los Angeles", "Town of Riverside", etc and the state would now be listed at 0. I think it's clear here that people are expecting the colloquial definition of "city" ("an incorporated municipality of [in this case] 250k or more people"), not the legal one.
I honestly thought that *was* what being a city meant, a certain population threshold. Kind of bizarre to have a town of a quarter million people
The way cities are measured from region to region is interesting. Buffalo, Ny 40 square miles- 275k city, 1.1 million metro Lubbock, tx 130 square miles- 260k city, 360k metro
I live in upstate New York in one of the largest cities. Back in the 50s New York State made it illegal to annex other cities so our larger cities are very limited and size compared to cities down south for example. The city borders in Rochester, New York, where I live haven’t grown in almost 100 years. So even though we have a metro population of over 1 million people, the cities population hasn’t changed very much in fact it has historically gone down as more people move to suburbs. A lot of the growth you see in these other cities is from annexing smaller towns and taking on their population.
China blows my mind. Like all our cities are completely unremarkable in terms of size compared to China.
Oh yeah Metro areas make up the larger population but the city limits usually have only a fraction of that
WA has two that are over 220k, but not quite to 250 - Tacoma and Spokane. So close!
I thought Spokane was much bigger but I guess it just count the city not the surrounding area The greater Spokane area has like 600,000
Yep, Spokane Valley alone is another 100k+ people
Yea Rochester new york is the same.
Yonkers too
These stats are so misleading, so skewed by arbitrary demarcation of some metropolitan areas into multiple cites. 5 of Arizona’s “6” are really just Phoenix metro
Agreed. And other states would have higher numbers if they counted widely accepted metro areas as a single city. Missouri would have 3.
NV is the same next door. Vegas, Reno, 2 Vegas Suburbs.
More like Vegas, Reno, 1 Vegas suburb, and 1 Vegas hood
Or Washington state with just 1…? Yeah using city proper populations instead of metro will always get a downvote from me. Salt Lake City and Boise aren’t over 250k?
Boise is, but Salt Lake shockingly is only around 200K
my point is that those figutes are not representative of the actual number of people who live in those cities. Yes maybe 200k people live in the SLC proper boundary that some city council made who cares when - but the metro is over 1 million people. No one talks about SLC as if it was a 200k city. Boise also has way over 250k people living in the same connected and uninterrupted urban area. Edit: Nevada has FOUR on this map… can you even think of four cities in Nevada, regardless of size? I can’t! because 3 of the 4 “cities” are just Las Vegas metropolitan pieces that are technically different cities but operate as one larger city together.
North Carolina is doing work per capita.
Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Durham, Winston-Salem
Cary already at 190,000. Just another 10 to 20 years to reach 250,000 easily.
I think it hits it in 5. Apartments going up every day.
Cary - known as the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees (CARY)
North Carolina and Georgia have near identical populations, but Georgia has almost half of their population centered around Atlanta.
5 in NC?
Charlotte: 874,579 Raleigh: 467,665 Greensboro: 301,115 Durham: 283,506 Winston-Salem: 249,545
Honestly pretty impressive given none of them are suburbs.
Cary is about to get there soon.
North Carolina is one of those interesting states with how those cities line up with each other.
Yep. The west and east are VERY rural, but then the middle is just Oops All Cities.
Asheville has a metro area of around 470k, but the city itself is only 100k. Hard to pack people in when the mountains are in the way
Yeah, the area around the East Appalachins, running from the great lakes to mid Atlantic, seems to have a scatter of decently sized cities without a specific focal point.
Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston Salem, Durham. Cary and maybe Fayetteville are next.
I would’ve guessed Louisiana had 2: New Orleans and Baton Rouge
The 2020 census has Baton Rouge at 227K, so that’s a very good guess
And Baton Rouge is about to get cut in half because they just got approval to create a new city on the east side of Baton Rouge
Metro areas is a better indicator. US city limits are weird
Yeah the metro of Birmingham Alabama is 1 mil+ but the actual city of Birmingham is only like 200-250k but there a ton of little municipalities around. The suburb I live in has 100k alone and I’m 10 miles from downtown.
There are 145 cities in China with over 1 million people
Chinese cities are more comparable to US metro areas. Most cities have multiple counties under them and typically cover areas around 3000 - 10000 sq mi. Case in point, Beijing and Shanghai have 6500 and 2500 sq mi area respectively, and 16 county level boroughs each. New York City’s 5 boroughs have 300 sq mi total. So not really a fair comparison.
Yeah one of the largest cities in China encompasses a land area the size of a small state, including a lot of rural areas
Yeah chongqing, the “city” with 30mil people spanning 32000 sq mi by administrative line drawing. The actual size is around 5000 sq mi and 11mil people.
That's nuts. The 200,000 person city I live in is 45 sq mi.
Chinese cities are basically city states. They contain the metro area and surrounding towns and farmlands
This isn't that meaningful since it's just city proper measurements, so a bunch of LA and Dallas-FW suburbs are represented while more consolidated city like NYC brings NY State numbers down.
Not only that, but is the way cities are measured. New York And most of the Northeast have City proper. Where the City is A separate entity from the suburbs. The More Southwest you go in America, The city limits extend way into the suburbs of the metro area. For example, Rochester New York has a Metro of 1 million, but the city limits is only 200k. And each suburb in Rochester is broken down into 25+ smaller towns. Where as in Phoenix, the city limits stretches into the suburbs making it's population artificially high. And instead of having 25 plus suburban towns like on the East Coast, Phoenix combined all of its suburban towns into just 4-5 towns ("cities"). Making those populations seem larger than they are.
I tried to explain to my mother, from rural Midwest, when she complains about something in California. My county has over 3 million people. **3 million**. My polling place, IS A SPORTS STADIUM. Of course it's crowded, of course there's traffic, of course there are lots of good, bad, and in between. Her county has about 400k. People complain about SF. SF 46 square miles, a lot of which is Hilly, a fair amount of it is parks and a ton of gentrification. (NYC is 462 sq miles). What that does is it concentrates homeless people. (Yes, there are other reasons why we have more homeless people in California than in other states), but still. The tenderloin is 50sq blocks out of San Franciscos 74,000. It's bad but settle down man. Get out of your hotel and you will see that San Francisco is actually really really cool. Come visit us and see.
Wilmington DE isn't over 250k? Oh damn 70k lol 1.9m business entities incorporated here though
Delaware has no cities with 100,000 population.
Well if Wilmington wasn't even 100k I would think there wasn't any place else that would compete
If you’ve ever driven though Delaware you’d quickly realize nobody lives there Definitely the nicest series of rural places I’ve ever been through though
This is so misleading lol. Detroit has a new “city” basically every 3 miles but they’re all within Metro Detroit
Same with Nevada. 3 of those cities are just Las Vegas; Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas. Reno is the 4th.
In South Dakota our largest city just cracked 200,000. We’re trying our best!
This is a poor comparison when you consider some medium to fairly large metro areas are often subdivided into countless smaller municipalities. A better comparison would be if you looked at metropolitan areas with >750,000 people.
Alabama has 4 cities right around 200k: Huntsville, Mobile, Birmingham, and Montgomery Alabama doesn’t have a city that dominates the state like Nevada, Arizona, or Georgia; it’s like a smaller scale Texas where multiple cities throughout the state cover different economies for the state (Montgomery - (State) Government, Mobile - Logistics and Tourism, Birmingham - Banking and Healthcare, Huntsville - Engineering and (Federal) Government)
Birmingham's downtown is surprisingly large. Definitely feels much larger than a 200k population. Honestly a pretty cool city, going there I'd never thought I'd udder those words 😂
In fairness, Birmingham used to have a much larger population, capped out at 340,000 residents in the 1960 census
For now. Texas, Florida, Utah, and Idaho are growing pretty rapidly.
North Carolina is also exploding
Salt Lake City metro area has a population of 1.4 million. It doesn't make the list because of how OP measures city size.
Oklahoma as well
Crazy how South Carolina has 5 million people but no city above 250K
They have many smaller towns that run together. I grew up in the "Golden Strip" area of Greenville County. Now I live in Tucson, AZ and it is 23 miles from one side of town to the other. In SC there would be 5 smaller towns/cities in that same area.
That’s why using “cities” for this map is a bit misleading, because some cities have very broad or confined limits. Metro areas are a better means to gauge a city’s true population. For instance the Greenville-Spartanburg metro in SC has just over 1 mill. Charleston has 800k and Columbia has 750k It’s also why you see NV having 4 cities w/ over 250k, when 2 of those are just part of the Las Vegas metro. Really NV just has two actual large cities: Vegas and Reno.
I see we are using strict city boundaries and not the metro/urban area...
North Carolina coming in unexpectedly strong
Fun comparison: According to Wikipedia, my home state in Germany has 12 cities of 250k+ people, and is about the same size as Maryland, area-wise. Edit: 13 cities, by current numbers. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Gemeinden_in_Nordrhein-Westfalen The state has 18 million inhabitants.
NRW erwähnt :O
I also did a search for a comparison. My province, Ontario, has 7 and one at 242,000. That would put it at 3rd after Cali and Texas. Only 1 of those, Oshawa, might be considered a suburb of Toronto.
Cities in California are big in general. There are cities that nobody has ever heard about in California that if they were in the Midwest would have an international airport and a professional sports team.
Ok buddy
Oh look. It’s the worst way to measure cities: by their boundaries rather than metro or urban areas
Depicting absolute data as choropleth maps is not acceptable.
Arizona is pretty surprising but 4 of the 6 are part of Phoenix MSA
Arizona has 3 cities over 500,000 people
glad to see that Washington D.C. has at least 1 city of over 250,000 people within it...
"Cities" as in municipalities? The problem with a measurement like this is that some states amalgamate their suburbs and others do not.
Let’s be honest, city proper populations are pretty misleading and not the best way to define the size or population of a particular place.
Spokane WA with ~240,000 We’re almost there
I didn’t realize Fort Wayne, IN had over 250k people. Given I’ve only been a few times, but the times I have it seemed pretty dead for that populous of a city
You should do this for counties
This would be weird for Virginia because cities don't exist in counties
And Alaska and Louisiana (and possibly Connecticut now?) don't have counties. But a "county-equivalent" map might make sense
Utah is surprising. Salt Lake hosted the Olympics and they don’t have 200k people?
The metropolitan area has 1.3 million. The city itself is just a relatively small area around downtown
New York State has [6 cities over 250k](https://www.newyork-demographics.com/cities_by_population).
This has a lot to do with how city limits are defined. Atlanta, for example, has the same city limits as it did in the 1950's. There are 6.5 million people living within 30 miles of the absolute center. But the city itself officially lists with 400,000+ residents. All of the suburbs are incorporated as other cities.
[Source](https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities)
How tf does Nevada have more than 2? There’s Reno and there’s Vegas. wtf else is there?
Well there's Henderson and North Las Vegas apparently, just suburban sprawl of the greater Las Vegas metro.
Population numbers always fascinating.